Enable Parental Controls but allow Google Drive and game playing

Question

I am administering the laptops of 2 of a friends's boys (13 and 15, so ...). I have put Parental Controls in place but this is playing havoc with Google Drive and Steam, possibly also Minecraft but not sure yet.

I have no answer for Google Drive at present, it can browse folders OK but on opening a doc the contents can be seen briefly then Safari crashes. Odd bits of voodoo I found to add exceptions to the web filtering do not seem to make any difference. Steam seems to have an unpublished set of IP addresses it contacts and whitelisting here seems like a hopeless task. So rather than trying to fight it I was going to circumvent the whole thing.

My proposal is to create a gamer account on each boy's machine. This has parental control enabled but is set up to allow access to all websites but restricts the user to run Steam, Minecraft (and any other parentally approved games) only. One advantage is that time limits can be set on the gamer account while leaving the main account free for homework.

Does this seem viable? Any answers for Google Drive?

Answer 1

Not a complete answer but might help someone else looking for a solution for Steam.

I had no end of trouble if Steam was installed in /Applications, even if there was no restrictions on which applications could be run.

However, if Steam was installed in the user's Desktop (or somwhere else in their home directory) then after initial approvals on first run it ran without subsequent parental invovement. I had no restrictions on executing applications, I suspect it may have different had there been any restrictions in place.